Hi! I'm Natalie, an aspiring illustrator, designer and web developer. Which means, I'm an art & computer science dual-major who spends her free time drawing, designing layouts, and then coding them up in XHTML/CSS/PHP/MySQL/JS/AJAX/etc. to make nifty websites. So, basically, I'm kind of a geek. Go ahead and visit my online portfolio and you can follow me on Twitter here.

In Part II I started a list of some personal process-oriented thoughts on illustration—more specifically about some ways to help broaden the creative process and make its execution more effective. In this Part III, I'll wrap up the list in the same vein as Part II's, with a few more of my thoughts on the subject.

Once again, while I hope these tips strike the right chord with readers from all creative fields and levels, I share them partially because many of them are still so freshly new in my head, and I can recall vividly their having planted themselves there during my time as a student. That said, there's plenty more learning to be done on my end as well, and I invite you to share your responses and your own additions to the list in the comments, no matter what corner of the creative world you are from.

In Part I we skimmed the surface on a few points regarding when an image becomes an illustration. But, of course, this knowledge isn't very useful if we don’t know how to apply it to our work when the pencil hits the paper! Or, stylus hits the tablet, whatever it is you do.

In this second part of the article, I'd like to share some of these practices that have been invaluable to me as an illustration student, and ones that I will carry with me for a long time to come.

“Art” is something philosophers have spent centuries trying to define, sadly with no satisfactory result (a debate that is far beyond the scope of this article). But illustration, while it covers a broad range of image-making, does have very distinct meanings, and it is very different from just artwork.

In this two-part article, I’d like to share some tenets behind what I think good illustration is, and what I learned about the process and technique behind how to execute it. Hopefully some fellow aspiring illustrators out there will find some of these helpful — or maybe even identify with some as part of their own process, too!

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